The Judges in the Head

Wednesday, October 17th, 2012.

by Steven J. Mcauliffe

Welcome to the crazy world of please-make-me-famous.

It is a world in which we all believe that our lives are only given meaning and validity by a self-appointed panel of judges who, with the aid of their combined wisdom, weigh up whether we are worthy of their time. Thus do we willingly offer ourselves up, ripe and ready for exploitation.

What better metaphor is there for our reliance upon others to decide whether our lives have any discernible meaning? And the illusion persists that if only we want it, if we simply desire it enough, with every fibre of our being, then we may just get it.

Sample conversation:

CONTESTANT: I want this a hundred and twenty-five per cent –
JUDGE: -Well maybe that’s not enough.

Witness the crushed and inconsolable who don’t make it through to the next-round of The X-Factor, or Pop Idol or Britain’s got/ America’s Got/ Finland’s Got – Talent; the contestants who prostrate themselves before sociopathic egoists like Simon Cowell – they are little more than pathetic imitators who have been led to believe that, whilst not possessing any discernible talent as such, then at least possessing a will to succeed should be enough – wrong. You see, poor contestant: you’re just a resource for them; and the chances are your crushed dreams will be the images they just happen to need for their relentless worldwide franchise bullshit for the eyes. It is a miasma for the brain; deliberately consciousness sapping and spiritually-demeaning.

‘Oh please give me a chance; I really need this – I can do better, I can!’- they wail; prostrating themselves before these purveyors of shit, as if they are divine kings and queens, god-like in their proclamations, the finality of their decisions carrying the same illusory weight as a fifteenth century Pope. Elimination is excommunication – once you’re gone, you’re finished – out alone to face the wrath of non-celebrity-dom. -Damned to an eternity of obscurity.

But what exactly is it they want, these people who are willing to prostrate themselves before 3rd-rate, dead-eyed, ex-members of manufactured pop bands? –Who are these people that can’t grasp the simple fact that there is nothing bigger than a hundred per cent (there is no 125 per cent -a hundred per cent is the total, dick-head) – who are they?

Fuel for the fire is what they are: Fuel for the never-ending Bonfire of the Vanities, a manufactured eternal flame that must never be snuffed-out; and if they can burn Michael Jackson, then what chance for a fat kid from Birmingham who can barely hold a note? –’Go on, take him out back and throw him on the fire, and remember to give it a good stoke’!
And what is it they so desperately want, these contestants: Money, recognition, acknowledgement? – Talent and artistry seemingly don’t have a place in all this. The back-catalog of great songs to be plundered is endless, and now they’re covering already inferior covers of songs and nobody even knows or cares from whence these very songs emerged (not from talent shows that’s for sure). Imitation is definitely not the sincerest form of flattery when it comes to this Industry. The long-dead Craftsmanship of the likes of Gerry Goffin/Carole King and Hal David/Burt Bacharach exists only as a source for plunder. The source has been lost within a highly-synthesised never ending echo-chamber; and the echo gets weedier and more ghostly with each repetition.

Cowell and his ilk are parasites, predators who feed upon the easily-led and chronically undemanding.

And as for the mega-stars themselves: They are merely the egotists-Supreme, fad-attached and desperately seeking sensation.

Yet even they are not content with their ultimate-stardom or the acres of gossip devoted to them or the endless multiples of tens of millions that keeps pouring in. Those that don’t crash and burn under the weight of their own guilt, or are rendered mentally-unstable by the total lack of meaning in their empty cavortings have begun to dedicate themselves to ill-informed and chronically-naive proclamations regarding famine, war, and politics. Many of the views they espouse just happen to be in lock-step with their predatory controllers, thus they (either inadvertently or very calculatedly) play their own part in furthering a geo-political, neo-conservative/neo-liberal pro-Zionist agenda.

-Madonna’s recent on-stage striptease (sigh, not again Madge) – ‘shockingly’ revealed her latest temporary tattoo: The name of a Pakistani girl who was shot by the Taliban. This of course begged the question (a question unasked by the compliant media): Here Madonna, why not cover the whole of your aging body with the names of Pakistani girls killed by American Predator Drones?
– But of course, the tattoo is temporary, as is her concern; the only cause that she ultimately and consistently champions is herself after all.

I guess the one benefit to growing older (other than the deeply unfashionable acquisition of wisdom), will be the privilege of witnessing the likes of Madonna – a body-fixated, ego-inflated superstar – having to suffer the indignity of impending mortality – I’m guessing she won’t cope with it gracefully .

But of course, by then, there will be other younger models for the deeply unhappy cave-dwellers to imitate.

Currently at the head of the trailing pack there is Lady Ga Ga – as equally self-absorbed and given over to empty sensation as her mentor. Two years back she went all ‘political’ – (not in the John Lennon sense of course) – the passion that stoked her fire was the burning issue of Gay Rights in the Military: Bravo, applauded the media, under the guise of equal-rights, you are fighting for two-thirds of your fan-base to be killed in the never ending American Petro-dollar wars.

But perhaps the greatest offenders when it comes to making ill-judged and ill-earned political judgements are the denizens of Hollywood:
(ahem) -Angelina Jolie as United Nations Special Envoy anyone? – At the moment Mrs Pitt is working assiduously on behalf of the UN, doing her bit to ensure we get yet another ‘intervention’ in the Mid-east, Syria this time – no doubt these visits have to be scheduled around her filming scenes for the upcoming the big-screen version of Mr Ed.

Back in 2006, it was the delightful Nicole Kidman, who was so moved to action she flew out to Israel – the only nuclear-capable nation in the Middle East – whereupon she bravely spoke out against the subjugation of the Palestinian peoples, in particular she warned against the soon-to-be-deployed white phosphorous missiles that Israel possessed in vast number, and Israel’s policy of deliberate targeting of children….oh, sorry, that’s not quite right: No, she spoke out against the terrorism of Hezbollah, yeah, that’s it.

I’m guessing that for Kidman this was a burning issue, it wouldn’t have been because many of the film executives, Producers and indeed heads of studios in Hollywood have – how can one put it these days – a certain sympathetic attitude to Israel (?) – Nah, surely not. I mean, why wouldn’t you accept an invite to a conference headed by that great humanitarian, Rupert Murdoch? –I’m sure the likes of James Woods and Ridley Scott and Bruce Willis would also have loved to have been in attendance, but hey, they had to make do with signing a much-needed petition in support of poor old Israel.

There is a point to all this barely-concealed ranting, and the point is this:
Who would want to be famous, really? –To spend your whole life in the company of these sociopathic self-serving, spiritually-bereft and empty-headed egocentrics?
Can you even imagine what it must feel like to only have your life validated by the sheer perceived size of your fame, to be totally defined by self-body-identification? These people that many people aspire to be are without doubt the least among us.

Although it’s easy to laugh at celebrity, and perhaps even easier to laugh at the desperate hopefuls on America’s Got Talent, or The X-Factor, aren’t most of us, to one degree or another hampered by internal judges – whether they be our peers, our parents, our bosses, or our teachers? Imagine if we unshackled and threw off the mind forged manacles, if we stopped performing for others – better still, imagine if Madonna threw a concert and nobody showed up.

Now that’s a happy thought.

Feedthemoon

+++

America’s Schools: Breeding Grounds for Compliant Citizens

By John W. Whitehead
Rutherford Institute
October 16, 2012

“[P]ublic school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state… students are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit their capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers, test them into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility and convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than by being valued members of the public schools.”—Professor Henry Giroux

For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.

Once looked to as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, America’s classrooms are becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens.

The moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on.

Between metal detectors at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America’s schools look more like prisons than learning facilities.

Add to this the epidemic of arresting schoolchildren and treating them as if they are dangerous criminals, and you have the makings of a perfect citizenry for our emerging police state—one that can be easily cowed, controlled, and directed.

Now comes the latest development in the sad deconstruction of our schools: “smart” identification cards containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that allow school officials to track every step students take. So small that they are barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce a radio signal by which the wearer’s precise movements can be constantly monitored.

A pilot program using these RFID cards is being deployed at two schools in San Antonio, Texas’ Northside School District.

In the so-called name of school safety, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to carry these “smart” ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times. Although the schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times.

School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000. As always, there’s a money incentive hidden within these programs, in this case, it’s increased state funding for the school system.

Although implementation of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government.

High school sophomore Andrea Hernandez, who is actively boycotting the RFID cards, was told that “there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card.”

Students who refuse to take part in the ID program won’t be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting for Homecoming King and Queen after school officials refused to verify her identity using her old ID card.

According to Hernandez, teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom. School officials reportedly offered to quietly remove the tracking chip from Andrea’s card if the sophomore would agree to wear the new ID, stop criticizing the program and publicly support the initiative. Hernandez refused the offer.

This is not the first time that schools have sprung RFID chips on unsuspecting students and their parents. Schools in California and Connecticut have tried similar systems, and Houston, Texas began using RFID chips to track students as early as 2004.

With the RFID business booming, a variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID Card Group and DataCard, market and sell RFID trackers to school districts throughout the country, claiming they can increase security and attendance. For example, AIM Truancy Solutions, a Dallas-based company, claims that its tracking system boosts attendance by twelve percent.

RFID tags are not the only surveillance tools being used on America’s young people. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, Calif., have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. As journalist David Rosen explains:

Each school day, the delinquent students get an automated ‘wake-up’ phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time. In addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations: as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8pm.

These students are also assigned an adult ‘coach’ who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to school.

Some schools in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking obese and overweight students with wristwatches that record their heart rate, movement and sleeping habits. Schools in San Antonio have chips in their lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating habits of students.

Schools in Michigan’s second largest school district broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the walls of the hallways in real time to let students know they’re being watched.

Some school districts have even gone so far as to electronically track students without notifying their parents. In 2010, it was revealed that a Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed with software that allowed school administrators to track their behavior at home.

This revelation led to the threat of a class-action lawsuit, which resulted in the school district settling with irate students and parents for $600,000. Similarly, in 2003, a Tennessee middle school placed cameras in the school’s locker rooms, capturing images of children changing before basketball practice.

Thankfully, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the practice in 2008, ruling that students have an expectation of privacy in locker rooms.

Clearly, there’s something more sinister afoot than merely tracking which students are using the bathroom and which are on lunch break. Concerned parent Judy Messer understands what’s at stake. “We do not want our children to be conditioned that tracking is normal or even acceptable or mandatory,” she shared.

“Conditioned” is the key word, of course. As Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham recognized in their book, Work Redesign, laboratory animals, children, and institutionalized adults “are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.”

Taking those ideas one step further, psychologist Bruce Levine noted, “Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth.

The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.”

To return to what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for compliant citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient and expendable, it is only because that’s what they’ve been taught in the schools, by government leaders and by the corporations who run the show.

More and more Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from cradle to grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to nursing homes.

In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated and distracted and unwilling to challenge the status quo.

All the while, in the name of the greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security, the government strips away our rights one by one—monitoring our conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies and our possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing the burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance state.

Whether or not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously attempting to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same nevertheless for young and old alike.

This article first appeared on the Rutherford Institute’s site Rutherford.org.

Replies

Tamohara dasa ADMIN. October 17, 2012 4:52
Tamohara dasa ADMIN. October 17, 2012 5:07

America’s Schools: Breeding Grounds for Compliant Citizens

By John W. Whitehead
Rutherford Institute
October 16, 2012

“[P]ublic school reform is now justified in the dehumanizing language of national security, which increasingly legitimates the transformation of schools into adjuncts of the surveillance and police state… students are increasingly subjected to disciplinary apparatuses which limit their capacity for critical thinking, mold them into consumers, test them into submission, strip them of any sense of social responsibility and convince large numbers of poor minority students that they are better off under the jurisdiction of the criminal justice system than by being valued members of the public schools.”—Professor Henry Giroux

For those hoping to better understand how and why we arrived at this dismal point in our nation’s history, where individual freedoms, privacy and human dignity have been sacrificed to the gods of security, expediency and corpocracy, look no farther than America’s public schools.

Once looked to as the starting place for imparting principles of freedom and democracy to future generations, America’s classrooms are becoming little more than breeding grounds for compliant citizens.

The moment young people walk into school, they increasingly find themselves under constant surveillance: they are photographed, fingerprinted, scanned, x-rayed, sniffed and snooped on.

Between metal detectors at the entrances, drug-sniffing dogs in the hallways and surveillance cameras in the classrooms and elsewhere, many of America’s schools look more like prisons than learning facilities.

Add to this the epidemic of arresting schoolchildren and treating them as if they are dangerous criminals, and you have the makings of a perfect citizenry for our emerging police state—one that can be easily cowed, controlled, and directed.

Now comes the latest development in the sad deconstruction of our schools: “smart” identification cards containing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags that allow school officials to track every step students take. So small that they are barely detectable to the human eye, RFID tags produce a radio signal by which the wearer’s precise movements can be constantly monitored.

A pilot program using these RFID cards is being deployed at two schools in San Antonio, Texas’ Northside School District.

In the so-called name of school safety, some 4,200 students at Jay High School and Jones Middle School are being required to carry these “smart” ID cards embedded with an RFID tracking chip which will actively broadcast a signal at all times. Although the schools already boast 290 surveillance cameras, the cards will make it possible for school officials to track students’ whereabouts at all times.

School officials hope to expand the program to the district’s 112 schools, with a student population of 100,000. As always, there’s a money incentive hidden within these programs, in this case, it’s increased state funding for the school system.

Although implementation of the system will cost $500,000, school administrators are hoping that if the school district is able to increase attendance by tracking the students’ whereabouts, they will be rewarded with up to $1.7 million from the state government.

High school sophomore Andrea Hernandez, who is actively boycotting the RFID cards, was told that “there will be consequences for refusal to wear an ID card.”

Students who refuse to take part in the ID program won’t be able to access essential services like the cafeteria and library, nor will they be able to purchase tickets to extracurricular activities. Hernandez was prevented from voting for Homecoming King and Queen after school officials refused to verify her identity using her old ID card.

According to Hernandez, teachers are even requiring students to wear the IDs when they want to use the bathroom. School officials reportedly offered to quietly remove the tracking chip from Andrea’s card if the sophomore would agree to wear the new ID, stop criticizing the program and publicly support the initiative. Hernandez refused the offer.

This is not the first time that schools have sprung RFID chips on unsuspecting students and their parents. Schools in California and Connecticut have tried similar systems, and Houston, Texas began using RFID chips to track students as early as 2004.

With the RFID business booming, a variety of companies, including AIM Truancy Solutions, ID Card Group and DataCard, market and sell RFID trackers to school districts throughout the country, claiming they can increase security and attendance. For example, AIM Truancy Solutions, a Dallas-based company, claims that its tracking system boosts attendance by twelve percent.

RFID tags are not the only surveillance tools being used on America’s young people. Chronically absent middle schoolers in Anaheim, Calif., have been enrolled in a GPS tracking program. As journalist David Rosen explains:

Each school day, the delinquent students get an automated ‘wake-up’ phone call reminding them that they need to get to school on time. In addition, five times a day they are required to enter a code that tracks their locations: as they leave for school, when they arrive at school, at lunchtime, when they leave school and at 8pm.

These students are also assigned an adult ‘coach’ who calls them at least three times a week to see how they are doing and help them find effective ways to make sure they get to school.

Some schools in New York, New Jersey, and Missouri are tracking obese and overweight students with wristwatches that record their heart rate, movement and sleeping habits. Schools in San Antonio have chips in their lunch food trays, which allow administrators to track the eating habits of students.

Schools in Michigan’s second largest school district broadcast student activity caught by CCTV cameras on the walls of the hallways in real time to let students know they’re being watched.

Some school districts have even gone so far as to electronically track students without notifying their parents. In 2010, it was revealed that a Pennsylvania school district had given students laptops installed with software that allowed school administrators to track their behavior at home.

This revelation led to the threat of a class-action lawsuit, which resulted in the school district settling with irate students and parents for $600,000. Similarly, in 2003, a Tennessee middle school placed cameras in the school’s locker rooms, capturing images of children changing before basketball practice.

Thankfully, the US Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the practice in 2008, ruling that students have an expectation of privacy in locker rooms.

Clearly, there’s something more sinister afoot than merely tracking which students are using the bathroom and which are on lunch break. Concerned parent Judy Messer understands what’s at stake. “We do not want our children to be conditioned that tracking is normal or even acceptable or mandatory,” she shared.

“Conditioned” is the key word, of course. As Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham recognized in their book, Work Redesign, laboratory animals, children, and institutionalized adults “are necessarily dependent on powerful others for many of the things they most want and need, and their behavior usually can be shaped with relative ease.”

Taking those ideas one step further, psychologist Bruce Levine noted, “Behaviorism and consumerism, two ideologies which achieved tremendous power in the twentieth century, are cut from the same cloth.

The shopper, the student, the worker, and the voter are all seen by consumerism and behaviorism the same way: passive, conditionable objects.”

To return to what I was saying about schools being breeding grounds for compliant citizens, if Americans have come to view freedom as expedient and expendable, it is only because that’s what they’ve been taught in the schools, by government leaders and by the corporations who run the show.

More and more Americans are finding themselves institutionalized from cradle to grave, from government-run daycares and public schools to nursing homes.

In between, they are fed a constant, mind-numbing diet of pablum consisting of entertainment news, mediocre leadership, and technological gadgetry, which keeps them sated and distracted and unwilling to challenge the status quo.

All the while, in the name of the greater good and in exchange for the phantom promise of security, the government strips away our rights one by one—monitoring our conversations, chilling our expression, searching our bodies and our possessions, doing away with our due process rights, reversing the burden of proof and rendering us suspects in a surveillance state.

Whether or not the powers-that-be, by their actions, are consciously attempting to create a compliant citizenry, the result is the same nevertheless for young and old alike.

This article first appeared on the Rutherford Institute’s site Rutherford.org.
Tamohara dasa ADMIN. October 17, 2012 7:41

Being ‘Prepared’ Now ‘Terrorism’! Prepper Put On No-Fly List, Stranded In Hawaii

Wednesday, October 17, 2012 10:05

Another story below that illustrates that our ‘illustrious leaders’ are in fact quite brainless. A man who had already flown into Hawaii and holds a TWIC card, or Transportation Worker Identification Credential, granted by none other than the TSA, has been held back from joining his connecting flight to Japan for being a ‘prepper’. 34-year old Wade Hicks has also held classified clearances as a defense contractor for the U.S. military. His passport is valid and has not been revoked.

What does it take to get your name on the no-fly list in America? Apparently you only need to be classified as a “prepper.”

What does it take to get your name on the no-fly list in America? Apparently you only need to be classified as a “prepper.”

When 34-year-old U.S. citizen and Mississippi resident Wade Hicks boarded a military flight to visit his wife, a Navy lieutenant stationed in Okinawa, Japan, he did not think it would be a one-way trip. Stopping off in Hawaii to refuel, upon reboarding the plane, Hicks was quickly escorted back off again by armed guards. He was then taken to a secure interrogation room where Hicks was informed he would not be flying anywhere because he turned up on the no-fly list.

Hicks has since been stranded on the island state without a way home.

As seen below in a bombshell double interview on Infowars Nightly News, private investigator and founder of the Northeast Intelligence Network Douglas Hagmann revealed that Hicks not only passed through TSA screening at his original departure point in San Francisco, but he has also passed a criminal background check and an FBI screening for an enhanced concealed carry permit in his home state.

In addition, Hicks holds a TWIC card, or Transportation Worker Identification Credential, granted by none other than the TSA. Hicks has also held classified clearances as a defense contractor for the U.S. military. His passport is valid and has not been revoked.

Seemingly the only “crime” Hicks has committed that would end in revocation of his ability to fly is his affiliation with the Mississippi Preparedness Project, a prepper organization. Although prepping is not illegal, the FBI has been cracking down on preppers for awhile now, with everything from spying on people who visit prepper websites to straight up stripping preppers of their Second Amendment rights.

Read more @ http://www.infowars.com/prepper-put-on-no-fly-list-stranded-in-hawaii/

This reply was deleted.

Forum